(I wrote this back in February, and never posted it, so here it is!)
OK, the Christmas decorations are finally all put away, as are (almost) all of the presents, so I can post again!
As you probably know, the Little Man is now almost 29 months old! He's getting really big. However, he isn't talking much more than he did at a year or 18 months old. I had brought my concern to the pediatrician at LM's two-year appointment, and he advised to just see what happens and check back again at 2 1/2. A few months went by, and I was eagerly awaiting the day all my neighbors (and fellow moms) said would come, when the babe suddenly develops a huge vocabulary overnight! When it didn't happen by about December, I decided to call in the big guns and get him evaluated by our county's Infant and Toddlers program.
I was hoping they would also look for signs of autism or asperger's during their evaluation. It's something you hear about more and more often these days, and LM has some tendencies that worried me. He wasn't talking. He has the longest attention span of any toddler I know (he can play trains by himself for half an hour without making a sound). He loves to line things up, especially trucks. Part of me didn't think that autism was likely to be a problem, but I was still really worried about it.
The evaluators from Infants & Toddlers came out on 12-20 to check out the Little Man. We saw a Speech Therapist and an Occupational Therapist. They did lots of tests that looked like play, and asked lots of questions. At the end of the evaluation, it was determined that LM was right on track (scoring 24-28 months) with gross and fine motor skills, but was delayed in speech. He scored at 20 months, and was age 27 months at the time. That means he was exactly 25% delayed, which just qualified us for free speech therapy services from the county. As my mom says, that's exactly the score you want, just enough for help, but not any more behind than that.
I did ask about autism, and they said that he showed no signs of autism or asperger's, so that was good news, too.
We started speech classes with Miss Teri in January. Little Man did well the first time, but Miss Teri said he was a little bit peculiar! (Poor choice of words, I think, as I got worried.) He has a long attention span, and was far more interested in figuring out how the Duplo gate worked than playing with the big barn she brought with her! Also, the fact that he knows lots of letter sounds, but not any words. He threw one tantrum, when she took the blocks away to do something else, but otherwise behaved well. I was a little disappointed, since he didn't really seem to catch on to what he was supposed to be doing, but everyone reminded me that it was only his first day! He didn't even know what to expect, much less what he would be expected to do!
He just had his second class last week, and things went better. He is still gaining some new words (of course, none of them are the words we are supposed to be learning for homework), and seems to be trying a little bit, at least.
